In postwar France women received important new guarantees of formal equality with men. Awarded the vote by the Algiers-based Committee of National Liberation in April 1944, women exercised the ballot for the first time in local elections in 1945. The appointed consultative assembly meeting in Paris since November 1944 included eleven women, one of them school inspectress and resister Alice Delaunay, wife of a lycée professor now a prefect. Thirty-three women were among 586 delegates elected to the constitutional assembly in October 1945, and thirty served in its 1946 successor, both constitutional assemblies dominated by three parties boasting a wartime Resistance record: the Communists, Socialists, and Christian democrats in the new Popular Republican Movement (MRP). The electorate's swing to the left rejected both Vichy sympathizers and older republican parties, and many enactments of the tripartite coalitions of 1944–47 benefited women. The preamble to the new Fourth Republic constitution of 1946 pledged that “the law guarantees to the woman, in all domains, rights equal to those of the man.” Judgeships, barred to women before the war, became accessible through the law of 11 April 1946, and women also found a promise of equality in article 7 of the civil service statute of 19 October 1946, albeit with a limitation: “No distinction … is made between the two sexes with the exception of special dispositions” allowed for some administrations.